


Of Stone and of Sky

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Desert, Dragons, Family, Gen, Ladystuck 2013, Magic, Rain, Rituals, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-10
Updated: 2014-01-10
Packaged: 2018-01-08 05:04:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1128662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the sun plummeted toward the western mountains' waiting teeth, the jagged terrain of the badlands fell away, stone dropping in layers of gray, gold, ochre, down to a vast, barren plain.  This was Hammerfall, the cursed place where the gods struck the earth to raise the Anvil.  No rain fell.  No rivers ran.  No life grew.  Even the vultures avoided this place, knowing in their bones that it was both holy and inimical.  Here the gathered holds of the northwest quarter came, every twenty years, to call the rain.  Here they brought life from death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Stone and of Sky

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chthonianCrocuta (lovesthesoundof)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovesthesoundof/gifts).



The journey from Dry Falls Hold to the raincalling was long. Twelve days' walk, scarcely twenty miles of level ground, and the sun shining bloody red and orange through veils of skyborne dust. The little party of six stayed well away from other holds, risked rivers and springs as little as possible, and left their half-butchered kills to the vultures for lack of time to preserve the meat. At night they camped under overhangs or between the dry walls of wind-scoured canyons, lit careful fires to cook their hard-won food, and slept long and deep against the next day's travel.

Even the dragons walked. There were rules, for the raincalling. That they were hard was half the point.

Terezi began to flag near the journey's end, her feet and hands unused to such prolonged contact with the stony earth. Rose walked beside her friend and erstwhile captor, one hand lightly extended to stroke a wing joint whenever they seemed in danger of falling behind. Neither she nor Terezi acknowledged the gesture, save once: when a twisting, stinging wind threatened to snatch Rose's dust-veil from her face, Terezi extended her wing as a makeshift shield.

As the air curled back into stillness, Rose caught Terezi's back-turned gaze and rolled her eyes.

Terezi bared her teeth in a parodic human smile.

Karkat's voice drifted back along the trail, shouting hoarsely for them to stop wasting time and use the limbs their ancestors had wrenched from the stone. This time Terezi rolled her eyes. Rose smiled, close-lipped behind her veil.

They forged onward.

The last night, as Rose curled against Terezi's side, tent-fabric beneath them to hold in heat, her partner's wing stretched out to give her shelter, she found herself unable to sleep. Through half-closed eyes she watched Jade sit guard, aimlessly stirring the dull red coals in their makeshift ring of stones. Terezi's heart beat slow and strong, keeping time with Rose's breath. A spark leapt from the dying fire. Across the campsite, John shifted, startling Karkat into a string of muffled curses. Feferi laughed; after a moment, Terezi joined in.

"Can't sleep?" Jade asked.

"No," Rose admitted, sitting half-upright against Terezi's arm. "A journey is nothing new, though it's strange to never leave the ground. But tomorrow we reach the journey's end, and that..."

"That's different," John finished when she trailed into silence. He smiled, his teeth ruddy gold in the glow of coals and stars, their gleam startling against the gathered shadows. "It must be stranger for you, knowing you'll have to face your old--"

"No," Rose said, slicing through his words. Terezi was still as stone behind her, and equally silent. She drew a breath and continued. "That bond is broken, past and gone. And none of us were born when our people last gathered to call the rain. We know the words; we know the flight; we know the magic. But none of us know what we'll be called to face."

"I know we'll face a long, hot, dusty walk that the gods, in their infinite malice, most likely crafted personally to torment each and every one of us in the ways we find most likely to induce sunblind headaches and fits of murderous rage, and that if you all don't develop some miraculous wells of common sense, we'll face that while already exhausted and ready to scream," Karkat said. "Which means lie down, shut up, and _go to sleep_ , in case you missed the incredibly obvious implication."

Jade and John traded laughing glances over Karkat's head while Feferi said, brisk and bright, "Oh, hush. We'll have plenty of time to rest tomorrow night and the next day."

Karkat hissed, the faint seed of a rattling growl buried deep in his throat.

"Shouting at us won't make you any less tired in the morning," Terezi said. "Nevertheless, you have a point. Good night." She pointedly laid her head on her forearms and pressed her wing down on Rose's waist and legs.

Rose offered a rueful glance to her hold-kin, then settled back underneath leathery skin and scales. "Good night," she echoed.

She fell asleep to the murmur of voices and woke only for the last watch before dawn.

They walked slowly that final day, in deference to their weariness and the weight of their packs, and also from a vague, superstitious reluctance to reach their goal. But as the sun plummeted toward the western mountains' waiting teeth, the jagged terrain of the badlands fell away, stone dropping in layers of gray, gold, ochre, down to a vast, barren plain. This was Hammerfall, the cursed place where the gods struck the earth to raise the Anvil. No rain fell. No rivers ran. No life grew. Even the vultures avoided this place, knowing in their bones that it was both holy and inimical.

Here the gathered holds of the northwest quarter came, every twenty years, to call the rain.

Here they brought life from death.

Rose paused at the edge of the slope, staring down at the scattered fires of those who had arrived the previous day. Hold banners hung limp in the still, dry air, no wind to set them in flight, and humans and dragons alike seemed the size of scorpions, scuttling about on the stone and sand in meaningless displays of threat. She stretched out her hand, blotted the entire camp from sight.

"Your year and day are long since gone," Terezi said beside her.

"I'm no longer of White Sand Hold," Rose agreed. She leaned briefly against Terezi's narrow body, pressed dark fingers to tawny, sunwarmed scales. "My loyalty is with you. Even so, Roxy is my blood."

Terezi laughed, a dry, stuttering hiss of air through knife-sharp teeth. "So she is. Do you want her to steal you back? Would you fight to return to me if she did, as hard as you strove to escape my watch?"

"I'm no longer of White Sand Hold," Rose said again. "Besides, my blood-kin may be wild, but even we respect the truce of Hammerfall." She reached up to tighten her veil against a sudden gust of wind.

On the plain, banners writhed and snapped, colors and symbols half-obscured by the swirls of choking dust that joined their dance. But only one was white with a row of blood-red tracks, rippling from spear-end to tongue-end like a heatborne mirage. Only one held the bones of all her childhood memories and dreams.

She had grown fond of Dry Falls Hold; of Karkat and John, Feferi and Jade, and the other partnered pairs; of the humans who tended the fields and the dragons who watched the herds; of the children and hatchlings who tumbled and played within the protective walls; of the individual terraced lairs set into the dry cliff wall, so different from the flat, sprawling compound of White Sand Hold. She had fought in its defense when Six Bones Hold staged a series of swift, probing raids. She had found a place with the weavers, to fill her days between flight and spell and steel. Dry Falls was her home; its people her hold-kin. And yet.

Oh, and yet.

Terezi set her hand, scratched, dusty, claws blunt from days of stone, on Rose's shoulder, pulling her pack-strap tight. "I stole you, Rose Strider, Rose Farsight, Rose of Dry Falls Hold. I claimed you. I would do it again. When I saw you raise steel against our raid, when you stood your ground alone and outnumbered, when you called magic to redirect the sun against our eyes, I knew you were my match. A true partner is worth her weight in water."

Rose set her hand on Terezi's, dry skin against dry scales. "She is. You are. I would have stolen you, had we been born in other bodies."

"You would be wasted as a dragon," Terezi said, "and what would I do without wings?"

"Suffer, I imagine," Rose said dryly.

Terezi laughed again. "That would be a terrible world. We made a wise choice to be born here instead."

Rose squeezed her partner's hand. "The wisest. As was our choice to offer ourselves for the raincalling. I have no regrets."

Hand in hand, they followed Karkat's shouts and the green-gold banner of Dry Falls Hold down into Hammerfall, toward the hinge of the year.

\---------------

Roxy stepped into Latula's field of vision like a mirage coalescing out of heat and shadows: one moment nothing but empty stone, the next a human woman, unveiled, bearing a gift of water. She handed the skin to Latula and sat gracefully beside her on the hard earth, as if their cramped and faded tent were a proper thick-walled lair, the ground covered in layered carpets and cushions, the air thick with the scents of incense and wine.

"They brought Rose," she said.

Latula drank the offered water and said nothing, waiting.

"My sister. My little Rosie. Dry Falls brought her _here_ , where I have to see her and can't touch her."

"Can't _take_ her," Latula corrected. "No rules about touching, unless it's with claws or steel -- and even then there are exceptions, if you know what I mean." She waggled her eye ridges at her partner until Roxy's crumpled face softened into a faint, helpless smile.

Then the smile vanished, as rapidly and completely as Roxy herself on a raid, wrapping herself in shadows like a second skin.

"She isn't White Sand anymore. I know that. But she's still my sister, and she's not ready to call the rain. It's a hard magic, and she already hones herself too fine. Rose doesn't need more steel, more stone. She doesn't need the lightning. She needs someone to let her be soft, not someone to sharpen her edges until she shatters."

Latula pushed the stopper into the water skin and set it aside, freeing her hands to trace gentle claws through the windblown tangle of Roxy's moon-pale hair. Her partner had come to responsibility too young, left to raise Rose and Dave with only her brother's erratic aid. No wonder she loved too hard, clung too tight, though she knew as well as anyone how easily the Anvil broke bonds and dreams.

She worked herself into such knots. Fortunately, Latula was _excellent_ at sliding through gaps, in the sky and in the mind, and this was a snarl she knew like a favorite, trusted foe.

"Rosie's Dry Falls now, partner. You haven't seen her for nearly two years. If she wants to live on the edge of the blade, that's her choice. You can't choose for her."

"But--"

"Even if she were still White Sand, you couldn't choose for her," Latula said. "No one can live anyone else's life. No matter how much we want to protect them. When they spread their wings, we have to let them fly."

Roxy sighed, slumped against Latula's side, pressed her cheek to the folded bulk of her wing.

"I know, I know. And sometimes they come back," she said.

Latula thought of scarred wings scrawling a drunken flight across the sky, thought of slurred words, jumbled thoughts, wild emotions. Coming back didn't mean staying whole. They were the people of the Anvil, those abandoned by the gods to wrest their own fate from the unforgiving earth. Even the lesser rites, the little nudges a single hold might make to wind and water, could exact a heavy price. But life was life. Mituna had won an easy hand of years for White Sand, had stolen rain to feed their crops and herds and win a margin of safety against the endless drought. She wouldn't shame his victory.

"Sometimes they do," she agreed.

Roxy dropped a fleeting kiss to Latula's wingtip, the warmth of her lips like a flash of sunlight on skin and claw. "And sometimes I worry too much. She may not be chosen. _We_ may not be chosen."

"Now that'd be a damned shame. The two of us, grounded, while someone else carries White Sand's honor through the storm? Horrors!"

"And terrors," Roxy said solemnly.

"And nightmares."

"Oh my!"

They looked at each other for a long moment, serious expressions painted firmly across their faces, silent tension twisting tight like a rope about to fray. Latula lost first: a stifled snort that built into proper laughter, her graveled hiss diving and wheeling around Roxy's high-pitched whoops.

When they calmed, and then calmed again after a single glance had rekindled helpless mirth, Latula raised her wing and nudged Roxy in close with her hind leg, tucking her partner close to feel Roxy's heartbeat syncopate with her own.

"We'll fly, partner mine," she said. "No gods or luck can stop us. I was hatched the year after the last raincalling, born in a week of storms. It didn't last. It never lasts. But those first years are glorious. I can't wait to win them back." She touched the dry ground, imagined it wet with rain, all the dust sluiced and scoured away: Hammerfall made clean as the day the gods' wrath first struck. "I can almost smell the rain already, feel it on my wings. Can't you?"

Roxy poured a dribble of precious water into the palm of her hand, watched as the dust caked into the lines of her skin swirled it into mud. She turned her hand over, let the drops fall sluggish to the ground. "Not on my own. But I can hear it in your voice. Tell me about the rain, Latula. Work your magic. Help me feel it too."

\---------------

"Heya, Rose."

Terezi whipped her head around to find a stranger framed in the far end of their tent, one hand casually holding the rough fabric over his shoulder. He had the same dark skin and pale hair as Rose, as if the sun had bleached all color from them, leaving nothing but light and shadow. His dust-veil was up, obscuring his eyes, and the morning sun cast a ruddy outline around his head and torso.

"Dave," Rose said, an indefinable tension thrumming in her voice. Her hands were still as stone around her bowl, which itself was a warning sign.

Terezi set her own broth on the flat, sunbeaten earth and turned to study the stranger with new interest. This was Rose's twin: in some ways closer to her than Roxy, but without the same stifling tangle of love and resentment that bound Rose to her older sister.

"I heard you're the wise man's bet to fly for Dry Falls this year," Dave said, neither presuming upon his blood relation to Rose to enter the tent, nor dropping the flap for an illusion of privacy while remaining on the threshold. "I wanted to stop by and see if your partner is worth her wings."

"I'm surprised Roxy let you come," Rose said. "I didn't know you were partnered."

Dave shrugged, the gesture a strangely familiar echo of Rose's own body language. "Aradia and I came to an understanding, and Roxy isn't headwoman yet."

"That wouldn't give her authority to ban any willing partners from the attempt," Terezi pointed out. She glanced at Rose, a silent question in the set of her face and wings. Rose looked down and away, tacitly leaving the choice to Terezi's judgment.

From the way Dave's eyebrows rose, he seemed to read the exchange without trouble. Terezi felt an unfamiliar coil of resentment in her gut, and did her best to push it aside. "I'm Terezi Pyrope of Dry Falls Hold, called Terezi Farsight. Come in and be welcome under truce."

"You two won a deed-name already? That's special. Aradia and I'll have to step up our game, don't want to get left behind eating dust and broken scales." Dave took a single step over the threshold and let the tent flap fall shut behind him. "So. How's the raiding? You plan to head back our way this year, or do I have to drag both of you over to White Sand's camp so Rose and Roxy don't miss out on seeing each other until we come raid you?"

Terezi bared her teeth in her best human smile. "You are, of course, welcome to attempt a raid on Dry Falls any time you wish. Rose and I will be pleased to meet you and your partner in our skies."

Dave's eyes slitted and he twitched his shoulders in passable draconic amusement. "Yeah, no, pass. I'm not facing Rose over steel if I can help it. Of course, if Aradia and I happen to get lost in a sandstorm and accidentally drop a letter over your hold someday, I'm sure you wouldn't need to draw blood to show us the error of our ways and escort us out of your skies. And I'm sure we'd show you the same consideration in turn."

Rose looked up, meeting her blood-kin's gaze for the first time. "Dave. Don't do this. I'm Dry Falls. You're White Sand. Sooner or later I _will_ face blood-kin over steel. The cleaner we make the cut now, the less it will hurt on that day."

Dave went still, the same eerie echo of stone-in-flesh that Rose fell into on a hunt.

"All holds are enemies after the rain is called. Any gain for one comes at another's cost," Terezi said. "The day of the Empire is gone."

"It is. The Empire's done, gone, vanished into dust," Dave agreed. "So is the day of the last raincalling. Notice how we're calling the rain again."

Dave bowed, brisk and brief, aimed halfway between Terezi and Rose so it was impossible to say which of them he'd honored and which of them he'd snubbed. In the brief moment of confusion he'd created, he raised the tent flap and stepped back over the threshold. For a moment a dragon was visible behind him: rust-brown scales with Megido blood-marks, a sash in White Sand scarlet wrapped intricately around her neck and shoulders. Then the fabric fell and they were gone.

Terezi stared after him, tapping her claws on the ground as she thought. Humans did have trouble changing their loyalty from one hold to another; that was the purpose of the year and day when escape was allowed. But once they severed ties and bound themselves anew, they could not make time fly backward. Rose was Dry Falls. She could not return to White Sand. And yet.

And yet.

"Do you want to visit your sister?" Terezi asked.

Rose took a long swallow of broth, avoiding the question. That was answer enough.

"We'll go at dusk, after the selection," Terezi decided. "You can thank me later."

\---------------

In the center of Hammerfall stood a single anomalous pillar of glittering gray-black stone: a spear thrust up from the earth in ancient defiance of the gods who had laid this valley low. Roxy laid her palm flat against its jagged, thirsty surface, then ground her skin against the stone. She counted: one, two, three, four. Then she turned her bloody hand outward toward the watchful crowd.

"The winged sun," someone murmured.

"But the line on the left--"

"The winged sun," another said. There was a general chorus of agreement.

Roxy stepped back into the circle between Latula and Aradia, and let Dave test himself against the stone. She hated that both her younger siblings were here, hated that she had no way to snatch them back from the danger. Dave, at least, was unlikely to fly; there were few signs more auspicious than the winged sun. But Rose had come from the pillar with the whirlwind on her palm, and neither of her human hold-kin had drawn a mark so strong.

"Empty night," someone said, and Roxy's attention snapped back to the pillar and her younger brother, whose palm was nearly solid with blood, only a scattering of pinkish brown skin shining through the blood like stars.

A strong sign, but a solitary one. And raincalling was never done alone, even the lesser rites a single hold might venture in the drying years.

Beside Roxy, Aradia sighed. Dave tapped her ankle with his toes as he rejoined the circle, leaned against her other side and let her draw him close with her wing. She lowered her head and they murmured softly to each other.

Latula lowered her own head and blew on Roxy's ear. "Poor things," she said. "I don't know about Dave, but Aradia was real excited about a chance to fly the storm."

"She'll survive the disappointment," Roxy said, equally soft and quiet. She slung her arm over Latula's shoulders, right where her torso blended into her long, flexible neck. "We're going to call the rain! You and me, wrestling the gods themselves. How amazing is that?"

"Beyond amazing, partner. So far beyond, it shot past the western horizon and came back around in the east like the sun."

Roxy stifled her laughter, unwilling to break the watchful stillness of the circle as the final humans made their sacrifice and showed their marks. Finally the last pair were chosen: twelve humans and twelve dragons to dare the wrath of the gods and steal life for another twenty years. Roxy held her ground for a long moment, wondering if there would be a ritual to close the selection, but the handful of pairs who were old enough to have come to Hammerfall a second time simply turned and walked away, back to their own rough camps.

"Rites draw power. No point advertising our intentions to the gods," Latula said, picking up on Roxy's surprise and irritation the way she always did.

"There's no point _not_ advertising, either. The sun keeps the same time in the heavens as it does on earth," Roxy said, but she conceded the point. They might as well head back to their tent and pull together a meal. They'd sleep better on full stomachs, and they'd need the fuel tomorrow since they wouldn't eat before they flew.

She let Dave and Aradia disappear into their own tent without protest. She might not understand what drew them together, but their partnership worked and she had learned, slowly, painfully, to step back and let them resolve their own problems without her interference.

"What do you think, jerky and water or mix them into stew?" Roxy asked as she lifted the flap of their tent. Then she stopped short, barely managing to hold her balance when Latula knocked into her.

Rose and her partner were waiting at the hearth, fire lit, something savory bubbling into stew in a leather kettle. The dragon had Pyrope markings on her scales, only the smaller size and looser groupings of the patterns setting her apart from Latula. Rose wore green-blue laces at her cuffs and throat, instead of White Sand's scarlet. The cut of her tunic was unfamiliar: longer, with higher slits in the sides to reveal her dust-marked trousers.

If Rose had stayed inside that morning, if she had been only a little younger, if she had been less exacting in her standards for a partnership, if, if, if. So many things might be different.

But here and now, Rose was Dry Falls, and she and her partner had neither right nor reason to be within Roxy and Latula's threshold.

"Are you trying to break the truce? This is White Sand ground. You have no leave to be here. Go," Roxy said.

Rather than answer, Rose lifted a final cook-stone from the fire and dropped it into the kettle. Her partner bared her teeth in a gleaming imitation of a human smile, doubtless meant to disconcert. "You'd banish us without even waiting to hear what we have to say? Rude!"

Latula wedged herself into the tent beside Roxy and bared her own teeth in a polite threat display. "Says the dragon still half in her hatchling scales who shoved her way into somebody else's lair. You have no advantage here, no matter that you and I are blood-kin and Rose was once our hold-kin."

Rose set her hand on her partner's wing joint. "Our apologies. Latula Pyrope and Roxy Strider, called Shadowstrike, of White Sand Hold, we are Rose Strider and Terezi Pyrope, called Farsight, of Dry Falls Hold. We come unarmed, to speak with words in place of claw and steel."

Roxy wrapped one hand around Latula's arm and fisted the other in her tunic to stop herself from reaching out to her sister. Rose, Rosie, little Rose -- but blood-kin meant nothing set against the ties of hold-kin and the zero-sum law of the Anvil. What Dry Falls took, White Sand lost. All she could do now for Rose was cut clean, show her she had no place to return.

"We'll fly together tomorrow," she said. "You know the magic or you wouldn't be here, wouldn't be chosen. The truce will hold until the weather breaks and the first sun shines through the rain. From then on, we're enemies. What else is there to say?"

Rose looked down at the fire, tiny red-gold flames licking over the bed of coal and dried dung. "Once, the people of the Anvil set our hands against the gods and their favored children, instead of against each other. Once we brought the outer world to its knees."

Roxy drew a ragged breath. "The Empire's day is past and gone. Even we can't fight the gods forever."

"I said that to Dave," Rose agreed. "He said the day of the last raincalling is also past and gone, yet that doesn't stop us from calling again."

"The Empire cannot come again in its old form," her partner, Terezi, continued, "but that doesn't mean we should meekly submit to the gods. We wrenched our bodies from the stone and our souls from the sky, when the gods would have left us to dream forever in darkness. We steal rain from the heavens and bring life to the Anvil despite all the gods bring against us. Even if one hold's gain must be another's loss, why should that loss belong to our people? Why not take from beyond our borders, as our ancestors did?"

"Because White Sand is White Sand, Dry Falls is Dry Falls, and every hold stands alone, little sister. Generations of blood divide us," Latula said.

"Or connect us," Rose countered. "Dave won't raise steel against me. He can't. Perhaps I could strike him down, but something in me would shatter with my own blow. I would break the same way if I faced either of you. Dragons have only one hold; we capture you in the egg and you never know your lost blood-kin. But humans are torn, no matter how we come to love our new homes and hold-kin. Right now that's a weakness, but once it was a strength. It could be so again."

Roxy was silent.

Latula answered for her: "It's a pretty daydream, Rosie. But you don't have the power to make it true. We don't either. Best to let it go and turn your heart to rain and sky."

"We can't build an Empire, that's true," Terezi said. "But we can make a truce between White Sand and Dry Falls. After a year, we could extend that to an allied raid. Then another. Then a third. And if another hold should see our success and ask for a truce, or to join the alliance, why, we would be _three_ against the world. Then four, five, six, and the whole northern quarter. And from there, all things are possible. But only if you join us. All Rose and I can do is see the path and share that vision. You're the ones who can wrestle reality out of nothing and persuade others to follow."

"The stew will be ready soon," Rose added, before Roxy or Latula could respond. "Please forgive our intrusion." She rose from her knees as Terezi unfolded from her lazy sprawl and settled hands and feet fastidiously on the stone. They bowed in tandem: to blood-kin, then cross-kin. Then Rose lifted the rear flap of the tent and they slipped into the chill, moon-limned night.

\---------------

Dawn broke cold and white, the sky a hard, cloudless barrier between the earth and the rain-bearing winds. Rose helped Terezi fasten the riding harness around her shoulders and hips and adjust the wide leather straps along the length of her stomach and spine. She tied the cuffs of her tunic and trousers, wrapped the laces well up her forearms and shins, and held very still while Terezi laced her into the leather overtunic, arm-guards, and leg-guards that lent protection from rasping scales.

Then they drank the last of their water, let their hold-kin wish them luck -- "Ride the lightning," Feferi said; " _Be_ the wind," John offered; "I'll hold your knives," Jade promised; "Try not to die," Karkat advised -- and went to meet the other pairs by the pillar. All the unchosen candidates were busy pulling down tents and packing up campsites; they would take shelter in the caves at the valley's edge, where the lightning and wind were less likely to reach. Soon Hammerfall was empty save for the twenty-four figures at its center, dwarfed by the scope of air and stone.

Rose climbed onto Terezi's back, tied the straps of her overtunic and belt to her partner's harness, and lay flat to reduce the shadow she cast into the wind. Around her, the other humans did likewise. The dragons shifted, stretching their wings and legs, waiting for someone to take the lead.

Finally, someone did. "Shall we fly?" Roxy called from across the circle.

"Yes!" Rose called; she felt Terezi's voice rumble against her skin and heard the general chorus of assent.

Roxy cleared her throat and glanced down at Latula. Then she stared across the circle and caught Rose's eyes. "Before we start, I want to take one minute. Look around you, everyone. Look at the people beside you. Twelve holds in the northern quarter, always at each other's throats, but we come together to call the rain. Once our ancestors came together for more than that. The gods cast the Empire down, but since when do we let their judgment stand? Twelve holds together can call the rain for twenty years. What else could we do if we tried?"

Rose held her breath. Beneath her, Terezi quivered with carefully restrained tension.

Several people shifted uncertainly, uneasy at this change to tradition. "One hold's gain is another's loss," a Serket-marked dragon said. "Show me two holds willing to set steel and claw aside for more than a single raid, and maybe we'll think about your dream." General laughter followed.

"Keep watch these next few years, quicktongue," Latula said. "You may be surprised what you see. But for now, let's fly!"

Roxy lifted herself half-upright on Latula's back and raised her voice: "We are the people abandoned and cursed."

 _"We are the people of stone and of sky,"_ Rose said, the phrase falling from her lips and lungs without conscious thought, her voice braiding together with twenty-two others until she felt that the very earth spoke through them in response to her sister's words. She reached deep inside for the seed of magic, the stolen spark that made her body flesh instead of stone, and let the ritual coax it up and out, ready to shape the storm.

The litany continued, call and response, the ancient defiance of her people toward the cruel and hostile world:

"We are the people who stole our own life."

_"We are the people who make our own fate."_

"What the gods withhold,"

_"We will take!"_

"What the gods deny,"

_"We will take!"_

"What the gods defend,"

_"We will take!"_

"Come rain!"

_"Come rain!"_

And then, all together, Roxy joining the others: _"COME RAIN!"_

Latula sprang into the sky, arrowing straight for the dust-veiled sun. As the others followed, voices raised in wordless song, the storm began to rise.

**Author's Note:**

> Some thoughts on this story and the world-building behind it are available [here on my journal](http://edenfalling.dreamwidth.org/744863.html) if you're interested.


End file.
